"To hear is to obey, Memsahib!"
The blue-turbaned Chandra Lal slipped noiselessly between the curtains.
Sarojini Nanjee moved to a door in the other end of the room, paused tentatively and stepped over the threshold. The door closed behind her.
And as she left the room, Chandra Lal reappeared.
He stood motionless in the division of the curtains, listening; then crept softly to a desk in a dusky corner. He produced a key from his breeches; fitted it into a lock; opened a drawer. For several seconds his hands moved swiftly, silently through the papers within. After that he wrote a line on a small scrap of paper. This he folded and slipped under the edge of his blue turban.
Noiselessly he locked the drawer and recrossed the room. At the doorway he looked back.... The curtains fell together behind him.
4
Dana Charteris sat before a mirror in her room at the hotel and released her hair from all restraining pins. It tumbled over her shoulders in ripples of gold; little bronze-tipped waves, rather reddish, glowed with soft fire under the searching rays of the electric lamp. The face that looked back at her from the mirror, a face framed in the shimmering copperish masses, had a lustrous pallor. She returned the stare of her own image solemnly and realized, not for the first time, that while the features in the mirror were those of a girl, there were hints of maturity. The fullness of the throat, of the lips, and the sympathetic, almost poignant expression in the brown eyes.
She sighed, then hummed a little tune as she ran a comb through the thick strands. The odor of tobacco floated to her from the adjoining room where Alan was making out a report. She liked the smell; it was clean and masculine.
When she had plaited her hair into two long braids, she slipped into a dressing-gown and pattered into her brother's room in bedroom sandals.